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It is believed that being sucked into a black hole would be one of the most painful deaths in the universe.
Like any other falling object, you would be violently stretched like a noodle in a process astrophysicists call spaghettification.
Now, an incredible new animation from NASA shows what we would see in our final moments if we could ever reach such a void.
the clip, produced in a POT supercomputer, shows a first-person dive into the “event horizon” of a supermassive black hole: its feared point of no return.
Although it does not show a specific black hole, in terms of size it is roughly equivalent to the monster located at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
Have you ever wondered what happens when you fall into a black hole? Now, thanks to a new NASA animation, viewers can immerse themselves in the event horizon, the point of no return of a black hole.
As the video begins and the ‘camera’ zooms into the void, we can see the bright orange ‘accretion disk’ with a starry galaxy in the background.
NASA scientists created the animation on the Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Climate Simulation Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The project generated about 10 terabytes of data, equivalent to about half of the estimated text content at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
“This new immersive visualization produced on a NASA supercomputer represents a scenario in which a camera misses the event horizon and ejects,” the space agency says.
“The destination is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, equivalent to the monster at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.”
As the video begins and the ‘camera’ zooms into the void, we can see the bright orange ‘accretion disk’, a disk of hot gas orbiting the black hole and its main light source.
The accretion disk is created by material that emits energy when falling into the black hole, whether gas, dust or matter.
We can also see the thinner photon sphere, a thin ring of light that forms closer to the black hole’s “event horizon.”
The term “event horizon,” which gave rise to the famous science fiction disaster film of the same name in 1997, is the point at which nothing, not even light, can escape.
Inside the black hole: the bright orange ‘accretion disk’ (top) and the photon sphere (bottom) – the thin ring of light that appears at the edge of the shadow of the event horizon.
An annotated black hole: right in the center is the event horizon, the point at which nothing, not even light, can escape.
The simulated black hole’s event horizon spans about 25 million kilometers (16 million miles), or about 17 percent of the distance between Earth and our sun.
After posting the video on YouTube, Internet users described the clip as “stunning, “beautiful” and “very cool.”
One commented: “Black holes are such a fascinating part of space, and I find them incredibly cool, but man, they unlock a deep fear within me.”
Another said: “Why is this scary, like my instinct kicks in to avoid it?”
Another said it was “like I almost fell down a cosmic drain,” while someone else joked: “All engines backwards!”
According to NASA, the first-person perspective offered by the hypothetical “camera” is enormously accelerated: it can reach 60 percent of the speed of light.
The camera would have to represent an astronaut’s point of view if we could ever reach a black hole, something that is currently impossible.
In the photo, the black hole at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87). The stunning image was posted earlier this year.
Xavier Calmet, a physics professor at the University of Sussex, said the gravitational pull of a black hole would become so strong that we would experience “spaghettification.”
“Its body will stretch into a long pasta-like shape until the strong gravitational force pulls it apart,” Professor Calmet told MailOnline.
“I can’t imagine this would be pleasant, it would happen quite quickly, so if it’s painful it’s unlikely to last long.”
Dr. David L. Clements, a senior lecturer in the physics department at Imperial College London, said “the end would probably be quick” if it fell into a black hole.
“It could be due to asphyxiation if the atmosphere is removed, or to a process called spaghettification, where tidal forces stretch everything into long ropes, which can be briefly painful,” he said.
Fortunately, the chances of Earth ever being swallowed by a black hole are “almost zero,” according to Dr. Clements.
“The fact that we are still here shows that this has not happened in the entire history of Earth,” he told MailOnline.
“So the chances are at least less than once every 4.5 billion years and probably much less.”
The closest black hole to Earth, called Gaia BH1, is about 1,600 light years away and is 10 times the size of our sun.
Researchers recently revealed the second-closest known black hole to Earth, which is about 1,500 light-years away.
FIVE BLACK HOLE THEORIES THAT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND
Black holes are among the most fascinating and most debated objects in the universe.
They have captured the public imagination for decades, thanks in part to the late Stephen Hawking, who transformed them from a hard-to-understand scientific theory to a source of mysterious wonder.
Mysterious: Black holes are among the most fascinating and most debated objects in the universe (file image)
They have also seeped into popular culture through science fiction magazines, Star Trek, and Hollywood blockbusters.
But what are the five strangest and most captivating theories about black holes that are so unfathomable they boggle the mind?
Here MailOnline take a look.
